Taking Stock: Chad Ress’s Photographs of the Recovery Act Considering Chad Ress’s photographs of sites affected by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (arra), one is struck by contrasting observations: the unassuming neutral- ity of these images on the one hand, and their potentially provocative political implications on the other. Between the two, Ress’s position is not immediately apparent. Does he, as he claims himself, successfully “avoid” revealing his own ideological stance or does his visual language rather present a commentary on this embattled government? Is Ress a critic or an accomplice in arra efforts? And how does his own project relate to his hope for proper communication about arra policy through stock photography? In a text for TIME magazine, Ress explains that he had found different types of data on Taking Stock: the government website that documented arra projects. In some cases, images were crowdsourced and what “appears to Chad Ress’s Photographs be stock imagery.” He speculates whether representing arra of the Recovery Act projects this way “ultimately result[s] in a more accurate, trans- parent, or historical document” that will be “up to the task of Miriam Paeslack remembering this very important policy.”1 This essay attempts to situate Ress’s photographs both as part of a large endeavor of “taking stock” of government measures and the tradition of surveying and organizing visual data in large sets of images; it also situates Ress’s work as part of a complex history of photography in dialog with artistic and documentary practices. The following description of the relation between a photograph’s referent and a viewer’s options for its further interpretation by the photographer Jeff Wall provides a point of departure for thinking through this issue based on a consid- eration of the “still” photographic image as an astonishingly nimble medium: 33 America Recovered The still picture is the most free visual form, it invites In his observations about the process of seeing photo- the most free experience. Since it shows only an isolated graphs, the American philosopher Kendall Walton touches on moment, it cannot and must not show other moments, this issue: it can only suggest them. We take the suggestion, and elaborate it ourselves, freely, or very freely, according to We have now uncovered a major source of the confusion who each viewer is, or wishes to be.2 which infects writings about photography and film: failure to recognize and distinguish clearly between Wall’s observation suggests the collaborative production the special kind of seeing which actually occurs and of meaning between the photographer, the viewer and the the ordinary kind of seeing which only fictionally takes moment. The “still picture” relies on interpretation in order place, between a viewer’s really seeing something through to uncover its entire range of meanings. This is particularly a photograph and his fictionally seeing something true for Ress’s images of recovery projects. They seem to directly. A vague awareness of both, stirred together in express and combine a number of different agendas. One aims a witches’ cauldron, could conceivably tempt one toward directly at representing the matter-of-fact descriptive text of the absurdity that the viewer is really in the presence of the projects provided by recovery.gov; the other follows a more the object.4 interpretive path. Together these approaches, and the fact that they are deliberately left undistinguished, complicates Ress’s For Walton, fictionalization happens in the process of seeing. work. It aligns it with both creative and conceptual modes of “Fictional seeing” suggests seeing the actual thing in the representation. This multiplicity of approaches figures directly photographs while one really only sees a representation.5 into the images’ form, which appears both documentary, Walton finds that fiction happens in the process of seeing striving to represent accurately and objectively, and fictional, an image—the photograph “owns” a “remarkable ability to “elaborating” on the subject matter. put us in perceptual contact with the world,” something he Ress himself describes his intentions in a way that calls “photography’s transparency” and which he declares the supports both the generative side of photography and its use to most important justification for speaking of “photographic create an archive of knowledge. He explains that he considers realism.”6 Transparency and fiction are related to one another many parameters including “perceived aesthetic opportunity,” when regarding photographs not as autonomous but as acti- his initial response to the content of the language, and his desire vated and rendered meaningful in the process of their being to create a “representative sampling of the broader stimulus seen, interpreted, and contextualized. efforts.”3 His photographs challenge their viewers by high- With their straightforward aesthetic, Ress’s thirty-eight lighting a space of interpretive uncertainty. The image remains color images of arra projects sites, objects, and people suggest suspended—undecided—and unfolds meaning that is particu- a reliably “real” plot just as they inspire something fictitious. It larly open to different interpretations. is this asynchronism between transparency (the “suggestion” of 34 Taking Stock: Chad Ress’s Photographs of the Recovery Act making things appear) and fiction (the application of imag- script or instruction.11 These seem to be images, then, that ination and interpretation) that Jeff Wall hints at when he take into account elements of these descriptions and yet don’t talks about photography as the process of “elaborating” on the reveal unequivocally what this-or-that measure achieved or suggestions which any given moment provides. how it was instated. “Elaborating” on these photographs, the Ress’s images correspond with descriptive captions; the viewer is confronted with multiple meanings. artist adopted the text verbatim from the arra website and Part of this polyphony—these layers of pictorial mean- used it as instructions for image making. Text and image, ing and the tension between transparency and fiction—is while clearly related and referential, tell two different stories. created in the ambiguity of pictorial form as well as in the Ress, unsurprisingly, decided for their display in this book space that Ress describes as “disconnects” between text and that they be clearly separated from one another; one spread image. One way of accessing this space is to take clues from contains the caption, the next the image.7 This dissociation an artistic practice that routinely relies on textual and visual between text and image is rendered even more profound means, and that trades languages of description and inter- through photographic means. The images’ documentary char- pretation: instructional art. This approach originates in the acter seems to underwrite arra’s explicit call for transparency; practice of conceptual artists in the 1960s. Sol LeWitt, an early while Ress’s choice of subject, such as inclusion of people or proponent of instructional art, famously provided instructions the depiction of a site that might have been chosen to corre- for artwork such as line drawings, which were to be applied spond most closely to a caption without being able to exactly directly onto gallery or museum walls and which took several identify its location, places these photographs into the realm of people multiple days to execute.12 Claiming that, “the idea fiction.8 becomes a machine that makes the art,” LeWitt prioritized The scope of Ress’s images is determined by the range idea, concept, and instruction over its manifestation, and of projects that were financed by the Obama administration’s thus confronted the instructional text with many potential 2009 arra stimulus bill. The website, recovery.gov, was set up interpretations.13 Seemingly transparent, clearly decipherable as part of arra’s requirement “to establish and maintain a user- instruction renders its artistic execution the subject to inter- friendly, public-facing website to foster greater accountability pretation—to fictionalization.14 and transparency in the use of covered funds.”9 To this end the Not surprisingly, others from the Fluxus Movement administration established recovery.gov as a resource by which in the 1960s and 70s to more contemporary artists such as the public might track expenditures. Ress used the same tool Andrea Fraser or Erwin Wurm, have understood instruction as starting point for conceptualizing his images.10 Recognizing more as a guideline for enactment than for creation. However, this unique opportunity and inspired by “the disconnects— unlike conceptual art, which is concerned with instruction between text and image—between paying your taxes and how only insofar as it serves to realize the idea, Ress’s work is deeply those funds are spent,” Ress used the project descriptions not committed to both image form and content. In other words, only as a guide to arra projects, but as a kind of suggestive Ress’s work’s content is based on the website’s instruction, 35 America Recovered while its form, i.e., its composition and framing are deter- line connecting the machine’s dramatic arm and shovel on the mined by his aesthetic decisions and interpretations. center-left with the picture’s foreground, slightly to the right. In this respect Ress’s project relates to modernist discus- This image is not a landscape photograph in the classic sense sions of photography as a means to capture instantaneously, (Ansel Adams comes to mind), nor is it a landscape image in but also to Jeff Wall’s understanding of the still image as the style of scientific surveys (such as Carleton Watkins’s or suggestive medium. Wall, a photographer who has significantly William Henry Jackson’s). Looking for clues and consulting shaped post-modern theories of photographic representa- the caption (the instructions), suggests that this is “New tion, is known to use compositional strategies that rely on Hogan Lake, Valley Springs, California.” The task depicted, historic conventions.